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Sunday Morning: Linked and Loaded

In health reform, there’s a lot of talk about an impending “doctor shortage,” where we’ll have too few physicians to treat a population that’s getting increasingly older and sicker. By 2020, we’ll have 90,000 fewer doctors than we need, according to projections from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

I am not completely up on the politics of this. However, my understanding is that there is to be a Payroll Cut extension but that Dems want to pay for it by taxing Millionaires while the GOP wants to pay for it by shrinking government.

I suggest we pay for it by Issuing 10 year TIPS at just over 0.2% percent real interest and then revisit the issue in ten years.

By now, we’ve all become familiar with Newt Gingrich’s habit of using a few choice adverbs to make the things he says sound just a bit more intelligent to his listeners. Profoundly. Deeply.Frankly. But none of them are as vital to the Gingrich lexicon asfundamentally (along with its cousin, the adjective fundamental). While this appears to be Gingrich’s favorite word in the English language, you could also argue that he uses the word so often, and so reflexively, that it’s become virtually meaningless to him. In a single 2008 address to the American Enterprise Institute, he used the words fundamentally or fundamental a total of eighteen times.

In a sense, these e-mails and tweets — and the annoyed, exasperated reactions many of their supporters have had to them — perfectly encapsulate one of their biggest challenges going into 2012: resolving the yawning chasm between the sort of politics America wanted from the Obama campaign and the sort of politics, the Obama administration has found, work in Washington.

This type of egotism seems to be running rampant among those—particularly in the right-wing media—who profess to be conservative. I believe this unfortunate phenomenon is the by-product of traditional conservatism being shoved aside by a radical, libertarian-inspired ideology that is deeply antithetical to traditional Burkean conservatism.

This ideology elevates personal freedom and financial gain far above all other values, and in doing so, empowers its followers to dismiss or even belittle anything that does not directly serve those parochial ends.